The essentials of Dove and O’Keeffe

It’s a show worth traveling to see.

The exhibition tells a story about the artistic relationship between two greats of American modernism, Georgia O’Keeffe and Arthur Dove. The story’s one thing, and it’s intriguing: We learn how the two artists’ influence on each other was mediated by Alfred Stieglitz, who showed first Dove’s work and then O’Keeffe’s at 291, his maverick New York gallery; how Stieglitz and O’Keeffe became lovers in 1918, the same year O’Keeffe finally met Dove; and how the two artists kept finding sustenance in each other’s work even as their paths diverged.

But the pictures are the main attraction. Without ever being spectacular or grandiose, they’re engrossing. Like the Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibition about the rivalry between Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese in Venice, the works in “Dove/O’Keeffe’’ are hung in discreet pairs or groups that largely disregard chronology to focus on common or contrasting themes and stylistic echoes.

Interestingly, it’s the first exhibition devoted to 20th-century art the Clark has ever mounted. The result is so rewarding, and such a good fit with the museum’s bucolic Berkshires setting (both artists were profoundly inspired by nature), that we can only hope it inspires similar sorties into the modern era down the track.

Dove was just seven years older than O’Keeffe. But in terms of the uptake of modernism in America, he was well ahead of her - of her and just about everyone else in this country.

And yet Dove was a retiring man who seemed, as guest curator Debra Bricker Balken puts it in her catalog essay, “constitutionally incapable of forwarding himself, let alone of plotting a career path or hustling.’’

He went to Paris in 1907 - the same year Picasso painted his world-changing masterpiece, “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon’’ - but he kept mostly to himself. He came back two years later, and by 1911 - the same year Kandinsky launched into abstraction - he was painting his own abstract images inspired by close-up examination of natural forms.

O’Keeffe, during all this time, was pawing and prodding at the emerging tenets of modernism, trying to work out which aspects made sense to her and which didn’t. By the time she met Dove in person in 1918 she already knew of his work, just as he knew of hers.

The show starts with a handful of early works from the period before they met, and the contrasts are already fascinating. Dove’s 1911 pastel “Movement No. 1,’’ with its spiraling forms that are faceted like a cut diamond or a magnified Cubist still life, some of them colored a deep and drenching blue, hangs near “Blue I,’’ O’Keeffe’s watercolor in lighter, more translucent shades of blue.

Dove’s work is inspired by the dynamism of a cyclone. It has jagged lines and a centrifugal energy. O’Keeffe’s work, spiraling inward, is all curves and airy space. To modern eyes it’s weirdly suggestive of an ultrasound of a baby in utero, or perhaps water going down a drain.

O’Keeffe had first seen one of Dove’s pastels - it’s now lost - reproduced in a book by Arthur Jerome Eddy. The book, “Cubists and Post-Impressionism,’’ was an early attempt to convert Americans to modernist principles in art. O’Keeffe read it because she was preparing a talk to the faculty at the Texas college where she taught.

It was just a talk, but she spent months on it, and it would be a turning point for her. It forced her to sift through ideas about unconscious imagery, analogies between art and music, calls to dispense with verisimilitude, and various claims being made for the psychological, metaphysical, or purely formal aspects of art.

Mulling over all this, O’Keeffe’s eyes kept coming back to the reproduction of Dove’s pastel, a distillation and abstraction of fall leaves. Having seen it, she later said, “I trekked the streets looking for others [i.e., works by Dove].’’

The effect on her own work was dramatic. Her forms were simplified; they took on an airy, intuitive quality inspired by nature. Unfortunately, there are no earlier examples of her work with which to compare it, but you can see the results in a somber-hued, boldly asymmetrical abstraction called “No. 24 - Special/No. 24’’ from 1916-17, and again in the squishy, undulating forms and burning colors of a watercolor called “Red and Blue No. II’’ from 1916. (Dove would later cite the watercolors O’Keeffe exhibited at Stieglitz’s gallery in 1917 as a profound influence on the series of watercolors he embarked on in 1930.)

O’Keeffe later said: “Dove is the only American painter who is of the earth.’’ Reflecting on the inevitable comparisons between Dove and Kandinsky, she said: “Dove came to abstraction quite naturally. . . . Kandinsky was very showy about it, but Dove had an earthy, simple quality that led directly to abstraction. His things are very special.’’

This word “earthy’’ was not just meant figuratively. Since his return from Europe, Dove had been eking out a living as a farmer in Westport, Conn. The going was so tough that - in the very years that O’Keeffe revolutionized her work, inspired in part by his example - his own output dwindled to almost nothing. At times, he was even forced back to the commercial illustration he’d pursued to make money before the trip to Europe. It was work he despised.

Meanwhile, O’Keeffe was building on Dove’s distillation of form and adding her own ingredients - in particular, a dazzling way with color. It’s simplistic, of course, to think that both artists took elements only from each other, but my sense is that Dove’s forms did not become truly compelling until he had adopted, as he soon did, aspects of O’Keeffe’s vibrant color, and that O’Keeffe’s color lost a certain tautness when it strayed from Dove’s abstracted forms and the earthy facture of his brushwork, to be replaced instead by slick and airless surfaces.

For many years, critics high on Freudian fumes took to valorizing Dove and O’Keeffe as the masculine and feminine poles of America’s homegrown version of modernism. They talked about Dove’s “virile and profound talent,’’ the “tremendous muscular tension’’ revealed by his pastels, and the “male vitality’’ they expressed. Meanwhile, O’Keeffe was praised for her work’s “sympathy, intuition, sensibility and faith in certain new ideals to which her sex aspires,’’ and her work’s “delicately veiled symbolicalism for what every woman knows, but what women have heretofore kept to themselves.’’ (Please tell.)

A lot of pseudo-Freudian guff ensued. To some extent, the two artists may have been complicit in this gendered dialogue, which not only enveloped them but also bolstered their reputations. But stepping back from the heady discourse of those times, one finds, as usual, that the critics and proselytizers, rather than the artists, are the ones who wind up looking silly.

Dutifully scanning the exhibition in search of phalluses, circles, wombs, and the like, one finds plenty to satisfy. But then, there are as many phallic shapes in O’Keeffe’s work as concentric circles in Dove’s, and in the end, who really has the time?

Much more rewarding is to home in on the comparisons Balken sets up.

I loved, for instance, the correspondences between O’Keeffe’s 1916 watercolor of a sunrise and two much later works by Dove called “Sunrise I’’ and “Golden Sun.’’ All of them employ rich, saturated colors in concentric bands with tight cropping, giving them a monumental quality despite their modest size. The same theme of circles or semicircles emanating light and waves of energy recurs throughout the show, in works both abstract and representational.

In the mid-1920s, Dove started experimenting with collage and found materials. There’s a fascinating connection between the thin, billowing forms with sharp points in O’Keeffe’s painting “From the Lake, No. 1’’ (1924) and a silvery, mysterious improvisation by Dove from the following year called “Sea II.’’ The Dove work is made from chiffon stretched over metal with sand. It lacks entirely O’Keeffe’s characteristically rich color, but the forms in his work clearly echo hers.

Stieglitz and Dove both died in 1946. O’Keeffe, who had been spending part of each year in New Mexico since 1929, finally moved there in 1949 and remained until her death almost four decades later. She became increasingly famous for her representational work - work that was proudly and self-consciously “earthy,’’ and “feminine’’ in ways that aroused much prurient interest.

At times, it fell into kitsch. But O’Keeffe’s coloring is never less than extraordinary (see her representational works here like “Large George With Crows’’ and “The Chestnut Grey’’). Her ability to distill forms to an unforgettable, searing essence - which owed so much to Dove - never left her.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.